Good news, slightly bad news

First, North Carolina moved away from paper-free voting systems. Now this...

The Virginia State Board of Elections voted Friday to discontinue use of all touch-screen voting machines throughout the state because of potential security vulnerabilities, forcing 22 cities and counties to scramble to find new equipment just weeks before voting begins for the November gubernatorial election.

Behind closed doors at an emergency meeting in Richmond on Friday afternoon, the board heard about specific vulnerabilities identified after a cybersecurity conference this summer in Las Vegas, where hackers showed they could break into voting machines with relative ease.

Bravo! I would add: Any state official -- anywhere in the country -- who argues against following Virginia's lead should be considered complicit in election fraud.

One small problem:

Most Virginia localities — including the city of Richmond and Henrico, Chesterfield and Hanover counties — have already transitioned to optical-scan systems, in which voters fill out bubbles on a paper ballot that is fed into a scanner.

Tabulators can be rigged. As long as the results are within a certain range, no-one will recount the actual paper ballots. We need a new understanding: Election results are official only if the ballots are counted BY HAND and IN THE OPEN. The names and addresses of the counters should be known to all. Ideally, the counting should be done twice.

I've no objection to the use of tabulating machines as long as the public understands that the first and fastest results are unofficial.

Meanwhile: Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State heading up Trump's bogus election integrity commission, turns out to be obviously corrupt...

A conservative firebrand promoting Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud oversees a Kansas election system that threw out at least three times as many ballots as any similarly sized state did, fueling concerns about massive voter suppression should its practices become the national standard.

Kobach has claimed that out-of-state voters prevented a Republican candidate from winning a senatorial race in New Hampshire. This assertion is, almost needless to say, a complete lie.

There are legitimate reasons for a voter to hold an out-of-state driver's license, as when someone attends a college in a neighboring state. Kobach's notion that voting should be restricted only to people drive cars is rather monstrous.

This is the real reason why I have no hope that the Dems will win the House in 2018: The system is rigged in ways that are subtle but effective, and the Republicans are making sure that the foxes are guarding the hen houses. I also believe that election rigging was the deciding factor in Trump's electoral college win in 2016.